Carson Ling-Efird
Cello
Twenty-year-old Seattle native Carson Ling-Efird studies cello with Peter Wiley, Christine Lee, Nick Canellakis, and Yumi Kendall at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she is the Arthur and Hilda Stander
Fellow.
Carson made her solo debut with the Seattle Symphony in 2018 at the age of 12 after being selected as a Seattle Symphony Young Artist. In 2019, she was a KING FM Young Artist Award grand prize winner and received the Seattle Chamber Music Society Monika Meyer Clowes Memorial Award. She made her international solo debut with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra Youth in January of 2020. She also appeared on NPR’s From the Top as a fellow in Show number 391. In 2024, she studied in France at the Ecoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau, and in 2025, she was awarded a string scholar fellowship to study at the Heifetz International Music Institute.
Carson has also studied piano and composition. She began studying piano at age six while spending a year with her family in Kunming, China. Carson started composition in the summer of 2017 and has performed her own compositions. From 2019 to 2023, she was a selected participant in the Seattle Symphony Merriman Family Young Composers Workshop program, during which Seattle Symphony musicians premiered her compositions. Her latest composition is titled Procession Quintet, which is scored for piano, clarinet, flute, violin, and cello.